Category Archives: New Guppy Strains

As I stated in the last entry, I would take the first good male and breed him with his sisters. When the male we chose mated, this is the offspring he produced in his first batch.

Here, we only have two males that seem to fit. They’ll have to do. Really, I’m just glad we got any. It seems to me, it’s rare to get a great batch in just the 3rd generation.

This doesn’t look great. Of all 11 offspring, only Male 2 fits my ideal. I do want to point out that Males6, 3 and 9 are all sporting a tail pattern called “Grass”. Those would be called “grass red tailed guppies”.

And just then, my tanks kept crashing when I would try to advance time. After a quick reinstall, the problem still wasn’t resolved.

You bet! If you come here for my regular Creatures blogging, you might be disappointed (or excited!) to hear that I’d like to turn this into something of an Aquazone week. I just got really excited about the game again after playing El-Fish.

This time, I’d like to try to make my old goal of creating a homozygous strain of red tail guppies. It’s a good first goal and one I’ll try to make without the aid of gene splicing. I’ll be using the pair above and, to see if I can get things started right, I’ll be choosing the best daughter and son that they can produce to be the base for the subsequent generations. Easier to start a homozygous strain if you can start with a pair with more similar genes, right? Besides, all the early generation variations are fun to look at.

By the way, I’ll be using Don’s chart (archive.org) as a guide for naming the patterns and colors I see in my guppy series. If you’d like to try this game for yourself, why not secure a copy from Amazon? I got mine for less than 2USD.

Generation 1 Males

After giving these two about 3 months time (changing the date on my computer) I got these three males and a lot of females. Of course, as much as I love the color in Males 1 and 2, I was going for a color more like Male 3’s and had to find a female who would produce similar colors. Stabilizing the gene pool meant making the genes more and more homozygous by breeding out variation – not something I’m used to in my dealings with Creatures. This meant testing each female with Male 3 to see what they could produce since the females themselves didn’t have an easy way to tell their genotypes. I stored Males1 and 2. If I really wanted, I could try to create a strain from them later.

Gen2 Males From Female 1

These are the males that Female 1 produced with Male 3. Two for three. Not bad. I’ll have to remember her as a potential candidate. Only male 3 is disqualified for his dark red color. Granted, this is a very small sample

Gen2 Males From Female 2

These are the males that Female 2 produced with Male 3. At first, it looks like she produced two good males, but if you look closely, males 3 and 4 both have an extra, blueish color at the base of their fins aren’t quite the right color anyway. This is the faint version of the “multi” gene described in the chart I’ve linked to above. This is definitely not a feature I’m looking for in my clear, red tailed Guppies. I’ll pass on this female for now. I think male 1 looks gorgeous, by the way.

Gen2 Males From Female 3

Wow! 6 males this time! Unfortunately, only Male 3 seems to fit the criteria I’ve set up. Males 2 and 5 are the wrong color entirely, Males 1 and 5 are too bright and male 6 is both too light and has the second shade at the base of his top fin. For now, though, I’m just trying to get regular shades of red with no secondary fin colors or markings. I’ll not be using this female

Gen2 Males From Female 4

Still not great! Now, we have 3 very dark males and 1 male who is too light! That said, Males 1 and 5 are precisely what I’m looking for. I also happen to like the colors of the darker males, particularly 4, but just as before, they’ll have to be put away for now. Female 4 can be stored with the other potential females.

Gen2 Males From Female 5

This is better. Here we have 2 males that are very close to my target color, one who is just a touch on the vibrant side, one who is entirely too dark and one who is much too light and has that blue fade. Still 2 out of five isn’t bad. I’ll be keeping this female.

Gen2 Males From Female 6

At a glance, this looks better, but you’ll notice that three males have that small blue fade. Really, one 1 male in this group fits the criteria and that is Male 1. Sadly, Female 6 will not be our founding mother.

This left me with three potential starting mothers – Females 1, 4 and 5. Given the small sample sizes of the offspring, it was really anybody’s guess who would be good but the lack of unexpected and unusual colors in his brothers eventually led me to choose Male 3 from Female 5’s line. Having only 3 sisters meant more work for me if they weren’t close to being homozygous, but I like to think my efforts tonight made that less likely. At any rate, I’ve gotten into the swing of things and am ready to start the next Generation.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it to any of you but I’ve been playing an aquarium sim game called Aquazone for about a year now. Don’t click away just yet! It isn’t that kind of aquarium sim!

This one has genetics!

While I have the option of creating pretty tanks that don’t involve breeding, I also have the option to create new strains of guppies, angelfish and discus! I’ll be focusing strictly on guppies for now and I’ll be taking full advantage of “Time Warping”. I don’t have the patience to sit and wait for weeks at a time for guppies to be born, you know!

Anyway, the manual actually comes with instructions if you’d like to start working with guppies. The first example it gives you is to try to stabilize a population of Red Tail guppies. The guppy packs don’t come ‘pre-settled’ so it’s important to have homozygous populations to work with before you start breeding.

I started by choosing a male closest to the color that I wanted. I bred him with F25, one of my females, and found that together they only produced one male that looked like this guppy.

As promising as 1 ideal male is, it still isn’t that good. Since I had so many other females to breed him with anyway, I decided to move on.

Attempt two, with F16 was much better. She produced lots of males (10 to be exact) and 4 were ideal. Since she only had 4 females, I have a much smaller testing population, but that makes it much easier to get what I want.

The male from this population that I chose is brighter than the original male but I think I prefer this more vibrant red anyway. Otherwise I wouldn’t have picked him. ;D

It was difficult to try to get him to breed with the available ladies but when it was finally said and done, I got this group of fry.

We still have some dark red guppies in the group but the numbers are still pretty good. This time, 4 out of 6 males came in the color we want.

This time, I’m going to see which female of the 8 I have available this time produces the most ideal males.

This is our new male. He’s much closer to the original male and all of the other ‘ideal males’ that I’ve chosen from this generation look just like him. The population is starting to stabilize.

This is the group born from our selected male and F1. I don’t think she’s the best choice.

The pairing with F2 was much more ideal but I’d love to see if any of the other 6 females yields a better result.

F3, unfortunately, doesn’t have a result. After an hour of trying, I couldn’t get my guppies to breed.

F4 produced these pink tailed guppies! As pretty as they are, I’d rather not deviate from what I started.

F5 yielded only 3 males and of the three, just 1 looks the way we want him to.

So. F6 yielded 0 ideal males. I think we can move on.

Now this is what I like to see. F7 produced 5 ideal males out of the 6 males that she gave birth to. Perfect! So far, she’s got a better ratio than any of the other females and I think this is about as good as it’s going to get.

At this point, I’ve been at it for about 5 hours and need to call it a break. Wish me luck!